New Project : Online Image Search, While Keeping The Images Secure

Question

I'm about to start a project for my other half; the ability to search archaeological images based on certain criteria.

The ability to search these criteria is right up my street, a database of images (or their file-paths) associated to some meta-data. The interface would allow searching of the meta-data, then display the matches with thumbnail views and summary meta-data. The user could then click on the image for a full size view and complete meta-data. (Thus facilitating bone analysis, etc)

My lack of familiarity is how to make the images secure (due to copyright issues).

Does anyone have any advice on where to start, which technology can give this security, etc?

(Needs to be free, and hostable both online and on her laptop, which has IIS installed.)

EDIT:

The level of security needed would be:
1. The general public can't see any images
2. Logged in users can see only images I allow them to see (access levels read from database)
3. If possible the files should not be downloadable
4. The images need to be kept high res and unmarked to allow analysis

This should hold even if they know the URLs to the images I don't want them to be able to see...

Answer 1

What do you mean by secure?

Any image that I can see on my computer's screen can be downloaded and saved to my hard drive.

Answer 2

That sounds like an interesting project.

I would suggest you only give access to the images to a authenticated user.
So store them in a secure location and stream them to valid users.

You might also want to look at adding a watermark to each image, and also possibly having each user sign some sort of Terms and Conditions.

In terms of technology, it depends on your skillset, all of the above can be achieved with IIS and C# for example.

or (a slightly different approach),

You can upload the images to a private profile on flickr, add tags as appropriate, and grant users access as appropriate.

Answer 3

As jfar said any image that you can see on your computer screen can be downloaded and saved to the hard drive. One of the options is taking a screenshot with the print screen button on your keyboard.

It all boils down to how secure you want the pictures to be. You could go all the way by letting users sign an NDA when browsing the database in some proprietary application. But that's the least practical option (and gives most grief).

The most practical is to watermark them or overlay some text on the picture describing the source, and come to an agreement with the copyright holders with how the pictures are distributed.

Answer 4

There are some good tips on this site. Many tricks prevent the right-click menu with the "Save image as ..." option from coming up. Some also obfuscate or hide the image URL in the HTML source (e.g. encoding the image URL in hex chars). I think the latter is extremely important. It's not enough to not show the image save dialog.

The article doesn't mention Flash: You can also have Flash display the image.

In any case don't show it in too high resolution. People can always take a screen shot.